Dental Card Services Alliance

Dental Card Services Alliance was co-founded in 2009 by North Carolina Dentist, Dr. Robert L. Harrell, to provide payment-processing services to the dental community.

To better understand our business, we would like to provide some background information:

In early 2009, I was approached by a friend who asked to take a look at my credit card processing for my practice. He had been in the payment processing business a while and had established a network of tier-1 processors. My friend assured me that I was overpaying for this service. As you can imagine, I was very skeptical as I have regularly negotiated this service and have bid it out on multiple occasions. But, to my surprise, he was able to save me 51% on my processing costs and fees (over $3,100 a year in savings with no switchover costs). I was shocked, but also equally intrigued by my experience. As a result, we set off together to determine whether or not my experience was an isolated event or whether there could be value to the broader dental community.

After testing our program capabilities and business plan with a handful of practices we were able to confirm a large demand for our services from the dental community. As a result, Dental Card Services Alliance was formed.

In our initial test group of dentists, our savings averaged 49%, typically generating between $2,000 and $4000 in annual savings. Some of our larger Ortho and Pedo practices were able to save as much as $10,000 per year!

After spending a several months studying the payment processing industry, we realized that there was a lot of unnecessary profit taking from banks and 3rd party vendors. We also uncovered that most plans were extremely complicated, making apples to apples comparison nearly impossible. Most dentists just don’t have the time dissect and compare one plan with the next.

Our discovery of typical market practices to generate as much profit as possible from every customer incensed me. Dentists are a unique breed that sometimes stands alone, but we always seek to protect one another.

Our business model is based a few core principles:

• We are processor agnostic. Rather than partner with only one back or processor, we have assembled a network of tier-1 providers. We have negotiated aggressive pricing contacts so that we can always provide our members with the best pricing.

• Cost-Plus Pricing
Every plan we offer is based on Cost-Plus Pricing, which provides complete transparency. Most providers will not even offer this type of plan due to the transparency

• Wholesale Equipment and No-hassle transition
If our members need new equipment, we provide it pre programmed and at our cost. All equipment is plug and play ready. We also provide 24/7 customer service support.

We are very excited to share our service with our fellow dentists. We are having great success as the word gets around. It continues to amaze me at how many other dentists are really getting taken advantage of the same way I was.